E tenebras, lux dormiens

Oops, I didn't realize that I had made a mistake in my sentence. I meant, now having learned of Wesley Clark's entrance into the political stage, I have retracted my support for Howard Dean.

Oh, I'm also removing the commenting system because of its unreliability. Just send me an email instead, or sign my guestbook on my home page.


15 September 2003, 16:00 Pacific Time -- 16 September 2003, 24:00 Greenwich Time
We decided to use the BART to go to the airport. We lived close to a station, so my aunt just dropped us off. We hauled our luggage into one of the cars and waited for one hour to get to the airport. After we got off, we kept moving to drop off the baggage and then to eat before we finally get onto the plane.

After flying the plane for nine and a half hours, through which I made sure to alleviate old fear of clotting blood in my leg by walking and scrunching every few hours on the plane, we landed tired into the late afternoon of the first day of London. We ran away from the sun into the next day from Monday at 7 p.m. Pacific Time to 4 p.m. Greenwich Time. I was tired because I didn't get much sleep on the plane.

We first checked into a hotel, Comfort Inn near the King's Cross Station, to which we rode for more than an hour from the Heathrow Airport Terminal 4. Wow, London was unexpectedly similar to that great city that was my first thorough touch of a great megametropolitan, New York.

Looking for a place to eat, we decided on the Asian noodle place near the King's Cross.

We explored the Covent Garden, which the next day or so, I would realize was the backdrop for which "My Fair Lady" was filmed. We ate really tasty waffle there.

I walked by the magazine section, and I waffled a bit after seeing the magazine Gaytimes, whichw as unexpected in a supermarket.

Google News
Draft Wesley Clark for President

Because I didn't know that Wesley Clark has offically entered the race for Presidency this past week, I was not able to post for it, but not having learned of it just today, I recant my support for Howard Dean. Sorry, but you're just too brash and arrogant and may not win the presidency very easily.

Welcome to Democratic nomination, I have been anticipating you since I first read about you in the TIME Magazine not more than five weeks ago. It's about time. Now's the time to start receiving the funding necessary to secure the Democratic nomination and finally beat Bush with your credentials and credibility!

Other news today include the fact that I start school tomorrow. It's so strange a feeling.

Here's an excerpt from the big post on London:

Before the trip began, I had anticipate
A vision of London as represented
By Rex Harrison. The actor in Dr. Doolittle
And My Fair Lady. I had enough experience
In my time in Montreal, Québec, Hong Kong,
Bankok, New York, Seattle, Calgary, and
So many more to avoid having too much
Of an expectation from my trip.
Even so, I expected to see people like
Rex Harrison, and other Englishmen and women,
Including Patrick Stewart, and those women,
Whose name I cannot recall, that played on
Harry Potter. Although the accents are preserved,
The atmosphere distinctly reminded me of,
Of all places, New York. Not Montreal, by any chance,
Nor San Francisco, nor any other cities, either.

I have completed my trip to London, I will post more details in the days ahead. Some of the posts will be in prose, some in poetry. And those in poetry will be either structured or free verse, and soem will rhyme while others will not.

Tomorrow, my mom, my dad, and I will to London fly.

We plan to take BART. To those in the know, you probably realized that BART has just recently finished building the subway system to the South San Francisco Airport, so it'll be fun to ride all the way there, shouldn't take more than an hour.

For those who do not know what BART stands for, it means Bay Area Rapid Transit. It's like a subway, a metro, except a distinct difference could probably be that it is both in the air and underground.

Of course, my trip means that I very likely will be unable to make any posts until I return. Even if Internet access was available in the hotel or something, I very likely will be unwilling to pay any fee.

But I promise I will post in excrutiating details, when possible, about my trip in London, each day of the 8 days of the week.

Until then, TTFN.

If you're reading this, Tile, I regret not being able to speak with you before I go.

thankful to my step-dad and to microsoft . . .

Error Message: Unable to Initialize Windows Sockets Interface

I can say for sure that I am eternally grateful to what Microsoft was willing to relent us to do, and to what my step-dad had done in researching ways to get my computer online. I daresay that my limited access to pornography would have made me grow insane, or at least, grow up.

Now my step-dad having made the success of the endeavor to get this computer online, I am free to explore and to find ways to not make the same cruel mistakes again. But more importantly, I am online, I can reinstall some web files, like Folding@Home Distributed Computing so that I can now make my computer contribute to the general welfare of the public.

But alas, it is too hot today. The weather has become somewhat balmy of late that I have made a sudden lurch toward the redefinition of post-Modern American English. I am sweating. I am so hot, all my body is nothing but sweat and stickiness. My clothes are so attached to my skin, that I cannot make a move without wincing in pain.

Temperature outside: 99.7 degrees Fahrenheit/37.6 degrees C (¡Ay Caramba!)
Temperature inside: 88.2 degrees Fahrenheit/31.2 degrees C

That is to say nothing of the obvious humidity that is keeping my sweat from evaporating off my body. Vaporize, damn you! Vaporize!

The ties and bonds

Sometimes, I always kept forgetting to inform the readers, and sometimes I always kept holding this information in. I should not hold it any longer. Starting next Monday, I shall proceed with my parents to the originating island of the English language, Great Britain!

Onward, to London! What jet lag we suffer, we shall put off and up with only for London! The inspiring, towering city of London!

And yet, am I excited? I should hope as much, I have not lost enough sleep in dreary anticipation. All my thought and duty are much too focused too far in the future. Shall I transfer? If so, to where? Shall I stay in California or move out to the misty place of New England? Shall I ever learn to find contentment, where contentment may be found? If so, if it was right here, right now, could I stay content?

Also, another thing: my cousin George, who reached the tender age of 8 in July, is moving away. His parents and he lived in a house quite close to us, but because of the unrelentless pull of new housing, and money making scheme of real estate, his parents decided to buy a new house, and use the old one for renting out to whoever are interested.

I will miss him. What character moving away from me, whom he considers, almost, his brother, may build in him, I must remind him of this one lesson: it still hurts to move away, to separate, to never be able to come to my house ever again because he lives too far away, too separated by distance, traffic, clime, and heart.

So he will have puberty away from me, the least that I know. He lives just one hour away on a good traffic day (which is almost never). What turmoils his hormones may endure, I will not be there to make my observation. How he may grow up, I shall have no pleasure to be his guide. If only he was not an only child . . . If only I was not an only child.

We shall soon see what he makes of it. It is rather that he has experience a true conflict, between the excitement of a new home with his own room (the old house did not have enough space) and the separation from the extended family that he is already familiar with, and the separation from his school friends here. We shall soon see.

Yet it highlights my own choice very clearly in contrast. It makes me more than ever wish that I had taken the choice of going to that UCD school, so that I could have been the first to separate, to live on my own. It was partly because I did not want to part with George, among many things that I now found out composite my decision, that I chose to stay in the Bay Area than to live away from home in a dorm.

If I had known that Georgiana and Jeff, and so many other people would have no compunctions about moving away, about participating in such glamorized mobility as touted as the beauty of capitalism . . .

I suppose that being able to move around is a good thing; being able to move to live in a better neighborhood is a right you must have; being able to live away from your parents is a good thing. But inevitably, such separation from familiar surrounding forces you to develop new ties, and developing new ties has never been my strong trait, for I would prefer to preserve old ties, to preserve, to remember, to reminisce about old friendship and the old days of innocence that I was once contented to live in.

To be broken from this into a sobering reality is what every child must endure.

We shall soon see. We will see, we will see. We will wait here and see what happens. Someday, when I look upon these writings (if they are preserved by Blogger) and I will see how much I changed, and how much I haven't, and wonder how much my perception is biased toward a more positive or a more negative view of myself in position of the world, and the world in position to me.

To the instance

Just when I had, after the dire conditioning, been experimented in a righteous mood, trying to get that damned card working, I found that I cannot 'startx'

[SIGH] No internet on Windows nor on RedHat, I'm trapped alone, isolated from this dear world. If I could only get online, but in a moment, I could a tale unveil that could sparrow delights in your eyes and hearts, initialize the innocence that once exists in your fair mind, and remove all visitations of evil and darkness to bring you into the Light, the Life, the Way.

So what am I to do if startx cannot start the GUI? I very nearly panicked, and have spent the last half-hour reinstalling RH 7.2, but rather than reformatting everything and starting clean-over, I have found myself choosing to just install the distro over the distro it had installed themselves. If this should represent me, and I represent my mind, body and thought, then this shows that my mind, body and thought still carry some excess baggage that they are unwilling to relinquish for the sake of sanity.

An apt Freudian remark? How dare you, no 20 Freud could ever match the thoughts that I--I am arrogant, I am a knowingly gnarly knavish newt, a pittance of pimple on the face of the world. I could do well to be popped out of existence were it not that I have it within me a reason for existence as beset upon me by the Almighty Prince of the Light. I cannot, nor am I willing to, do anything that would constitute a deliberate, intentional, willing self-slaughter.

If but for one thing that I could solve, this connection to the outside world, however virtual, I could be happy but for a moment. For now, I shall not be happy because I am not content.

That, were it possible, for me to speak coherently, not in such an ugly manner that does not befit one that keeps a diary/journal/log of what are deemed important by him to present to this great stage.

Tarry on! You shall soon see whether I succeed in my endeavor or no.

First the misadventure, then politics

Ah, realizing the infallibility nature of the PC, all my data were stored in 0 and 1, and I just erased the very thing that kept track of where and what these things were supposed to do. The FAT (file allocation system)

I am still trying to connect to the Internet, but I am almost at loss and giving up on Windows. Rather than, after suffering a bruising fight that resulted in me losing memory of the last six years, wimping out and going back to live under the FUD of Redmond, I have taken this chance to view it as making full to the end goal as being the consumer that wasn't. At least until the Nerd that governs us cease his tactics and live in the new age of efficiency, not largesse, of streamlined codes, not bloated "millions of lines" that leave concerns of how such codes might leave us vulnerable.

Perhaps I should not be so condemning of the company from Redmond, it is just the latest in the capitalist venture that has begun in the industrial revolution. I support bridled capitalism, and bridled democracy. But it will always be an eternal debate: bridled by whom? The people? they are not educated enough. The politician? they are overfed. The rich people? they are selfish and greedy, nothing is requested of them toward philanthropy. The poor people? the last revolution we had in world history resulted in a dictatorship. The middle class? they are too concerned with mimicking the grandeur of the rich to be concerned with what affects their everyday lives.

It is in people's nature to test the limits of what rules are given them. It is in the nature of people, when they are given an inch, they will take a mile. Witness the recall effort, the attempt to use a poorly defined constitution to its perversion. I suppose it is necessary that people find a way to channel anger at a government by using recall. If there was no such provisions in the constitution, there would be anarchy. You give them a law, they will test it. What the founding fathers of the United States Constitution wanted was a way to make the people's natural ability to selfishness and testing of the laws cancel each other out. The Presidency would expand and test its laws (witness Vietnam) and the Congress would in turn expand and test its own law as well (witness Clinton).

What is the most frustrating part is that the California Constitution did not make any plan for inflation. I suppose that gold was the currency at the time, and it was considered to be a stable currency, but since then, upheavals in the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, Cold War, charge card, we have abandoned the usage of gold and relied on cash, paper currency instead. What has resulted was an inflation. After all, you must remember that 3,500 was considered a massive amount of money 100 years ago. The money you must pay to avoid the draft in the Civil War was 300 dollars. 300 dollars by now is measly changes. Everybody has much more than that in their bank account. It is worth two weeks of work at minimum wage, pre-taxed. If the writer of that constitution was prescience, he would have recognized the need to tie the money needed to pay to register for the presidency to the inflation rate in order to keep so many people from registering to vote. Now with 134 candidates (depending on whom you ask), the money they spent is effectively wasted because of the entrance of Gubernatorial Candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger and subsequently in response, Gubernatorial Candidate/Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. You could point out that the US Constitution has its own quirk as well. In it, there is a provision that says to get a trial, you must sue for at least 20 dollars. Wow, what a massive amount. If only there was a way to test for inflation, and you could see how much it would have been. Fortunately, there is no way anybody would sue for 20 dollars because it is worthless compared to the prices you must pay to submit documents for court proceeding. My name-change alone costed close to 3,000 dollars. [will check facts and submit update]

I support moderation of everything, and moderation in that moderation.

Late, late, late!

I profoundly apologize to all who are reading this, even if it's only two persons, for not posting for the past week. I engaged in a terrible mistake involving RedHat for which I am struggling to repent. I accidentally initialized my hard disk drive. For those who know what that means, I applaud your prescience and urge you to gasp. For those who do not, I will now proceed to explain the meaning, and then everyone can read the circumstances that led me to make such a horrendously stupid action that are even now having repercussions for me for the days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries to come.

Initializing a hard disk drive means to start all over again. When you have only one hard disk drive, even with several partitions (through which you can make different virtual hard disk), and that hard disk has your Windows files in it, to initialize means to utterly destroy, with little hope of bringing it back or undoing your mistake. So I initialized, and now everything in my hard disk drive is gone, gone, gone, gone! Far gone, far gone! With such a simple click, I have created a damning rupture in the space-time continuum that only I can endure, but no one else. Ay, for this I am damned, doomed to spend eternity in the 2nd level of hell, the opportunist! Ay, me!

Now to explain the circumstance . . . I was dissatisfied with the amount of disk space that I had given to the RedHat installation, with prime foreboding, haughty arrogance and confidence in my ability to handle the dark and deep ineer working of the computer, I sought to increase the partition of the RedHat through 'fdisk' command in MS-DOS.

When I tried to restart the computer, the command prompt could not read my boot loader. Here was my first mistake. I neglected to use the 'fdisk /mbr' to fix the master boot record so that the MBR could find Windows 98. Rather than doing so, the computer left me at the 'grub>' prompt where I could do nothing. I used a Windows startup disk and could start windows by going to 'c:' and 'cd windows' and finally enter 'win'. But wherefore could the Grub Loader not work?

I attempted to boot using the RedHat installation disk and see if I could install RedHat Linux. My second mistake. I came upon the step where RedHat had to read the disk partitions and sadly informed me that the MBR is unloadable, and it cannot proceed without initializing the hard disk drive. Oh, there was ample information that initializing the HDD would ultimately result in the loss of everything, everything, everything . . .

The first time I decided to give up, but the second time, I just said yes, to initialize the HDD. I thought only the partition would be initialize . . . Ah the ignorance in me, the damning ignorance. I am too bloody brave, and while in confidence, dumb.

I have explained that attempting to boot using the installation disk was my second mistake, but looking back, I notice that I did not elaborate. I shall do so now. There was an option, I could have used the 'linux rescue' mode to boot from the boot up disk rather than to try to use RedHat Installation. Installation is dumb, it knows nothing, and is not prepared to deal with anything involving the need to rescue. From the rescue on, I could have modified the 'grub.conf' to point to where the Linux partition was currently. Or if the partition was destroyed, I could have used fdisk /mbr from MSDos anyway using the Windows 98 Startup disk. It could have fixed everything.

Let me give you the specs on my computer: one HDD, divided into three partitions, two for Windows C: and D: drive, one for RedHat, totaling 57 GB. Initially it was 20 MB for C:, 26 MB for D: and 11 MB for RedHat. I wanted to change it to 19 MB for C, 19 MB for D, and 19 MB for RedHat, a more "equal" division. To repartition, I would need to destroy both D and ext3 (redhat) to divide the new partition again. I moved files I wanted to save, that I downloaded from the Internet through Windows from RedHat back to Windows. Then I moved all the contents of Drive D to Drive C. Then, I repartitioned. I efforted to remove Drive D and ext3.

After the repartitioning, of course, is when I decided to use RedHat Installation because I could not start Windows or the grub boot loader.

The fatal mistake, then I tried to go back after seeing what my newly initialized HDD looks like, just a blank, empty 57 GB space, tried to undo it. I couldn't. In MS DOS, I could not access my HDD in any way, C:, D:, RedHat, all GONE! Everything I saved, gone!

My files, my documents from high school, from last year in college, my poems (even though they were lousy), my stories, my everything. It was so heartwrenching for me, I breathed faster, my heart skipped a beat as all the neurons of my brain slowly gained the terrible realization. Of course, my mind works faster that I could explain. I thought that the HDD still had some files, it was just the FAT that was gone. I tried to think of some software that could possibly put everything back . . . But I decided, my third mistake, to repartition it per my original intention and to reformat everything, without testing my theory.

Somebody might asked whether I had made a backup of my file system. Yes, but one month ago and only for drive C. The backup took 31 CDs out of the 50 I had available. Because the average CD can hold only at most 700 MB, I had simply made a disk image, but not as I intended, a file copy. Because of this stupidity, I realized that I could have had all the drive D files copied onto the drive C to be backed up, and I could have defragmented my entire HD so that the first part of the 31 CDs would be backed up promptly.

I will tell you why I am talking about defragmentation. It turns out that the backup I made was faulty. Upon the eighth fatal disk, I had a segment fault from which I could not recover. So I could only back up to the eighth disk and no more, the rest, as Hamlet said, is silence.

Fairly undaunted, I proceeded to install RedHat, leaving the rest of the partitions to what Windows may.

What I could use from the 7 and a half CDs backup, I had to run scandisk again and again, and run Windows in Safe Mode to fix some directory structures and file systems, then I reinstalled Windows 98 again. It seems a blessing that Microsoft could design the scandisk that is capable to restoring at least some of my files . . .

I could have chosen instead to start a complete fresh install from a Windows 98 installation disk, but let me tell you . . . I have nothing of that disk. I have only the Windows 98 upgrade, which for some reasons, need a previous versions, down to Windows 3.1, in order to continue with the setup. I could not do so (install Windows 3.1) because Windows 3.1 is on that big disk that originates the name "floppy." How supposedly antiquated and obsolete that I don't even have the 5" drive to install Windows 3.1. Also, I suppose that Windows 3.1 would require MS-DOS 6.2, which I cannot install either without MS-DOS 6.0. ***SIGH***

Alas, a mistake was made. And from arrogance and pride of the highest peak, his ego is bruised and a man's life destroyed. No, not destroyed, that would be a blessing, no a man's life was erased! For so many years I have used this version of Windows, from the beginning, all my files, hidden away in the deep interiors of my HDD, GONE!

I cannot believe my stupidity in retrospect . . . but it is not truly that I am stupid, but that I am ignorant, I had not made an effort to study the documentations more thoroughly. I had studied the documentation and for that I was able to repartition the HDD safely and install RedHat. Unfortunately, for increasing the disk space, I had not studied beforehand, so that in case of emergency, I could have it within my means and my memory to bring rectify everything again. Because I could not access my files, I panicked and made rash decisions that I will now live to regret because some things are lost forever. Some might have suggested to me that I put my files online, so that if my disk should fail, I should be able to find them online and get them back. Now I see that nothing's doing.

Now, I have my Windows back in some parts, my drive D, which contained my documents I've written from high school, is lost, was never backed up. It also contained installation programs for Windows and Linux that I didn't want to save to drive C. The only problem is, and I laugh derisively, I cannot get online even with Windows 98. I suppose that Dad had tweaked a setting to allow Internet Explorer to recognize a port through which it could go online, but it cannot, so my wireless is sitting useless . . .

Now, to the matter straight. I suppose it could be considered a blessing and a curse. I had only wanted to try RedHat, and my end goal was a possible complete defection from Windows. I inadvertently almost forced it upon myself . . . that were I not to have a backup at all, I could have been a pure RedHat GNU Linux user . . . It was the first backup I ever made, to consider making a backup was too much of a hassle to me until I had the CD burner. Without it, to backup using the tape backup, which I don't have, or the floppy disk, would have been an immensely difficult undertaking.

We shall see what happens next, what future holds. Until then, forgive me, my dear readers both for not posting, and for posting such a long one that I should think it better that I summarized and linked the file.